'I want to be my own hero': Former Edmonton soldier fights back against domestic violence

Jana G. Pruden, Edmonton Journal09.14.2015

Edmonton's Candyce Neill is one of an unknown number of Alberta women who live in fear that they will be killed by an abusive partner or ex-partner. "I'm scared for my life," Neill says.Shaughn Butts
/ Edmonton Journal

Jill Dean, the sister of Nancy Cooper, who was slain by her husband in North Carolina, now runs a domestic violence program in Edmonton.Bruce Edwards
/ Edmonton Journal, file

Candyce Chwyl Neill’s body tenses as she peers around a corner in the hallway in her apartment building. She’s more relaxed because it is daylight and a reporter is with her, but her body goes through the movements instinctively. She shields herself with the heavy door as she leaves the building, looking right, then left, before she walks outside.

“Good thing I was a soldier,” she says.

In fact, the threats Neill faced as a decorated member of the Canadian military for 14 years are not as scary as what she feels now: A deep fear that after years of abuse, her ex-boyfriend will find her and kill her.

Neill is one of an unknown number of Alberta women who live in fear they will be killed by an abusive partner or ex-partner. She decided to share her story after the murder of Nadine Skow, a woman who was killed inside her central Edmonton apartment on Aug. 24, allegedly by her ex-boyfriend. Neill had a mutual friend with Skow, and says the case hit close to home.

“I’m scared for my life,” Neill says. “I have faced bombs in Jerusalem, I have been stoned with rocks on buses through the desert. I have never been this scared.”

Domestic violence remains a significant and ongoing issue in Edmonton. Alberta has one of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the country, third after Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Domestic violence rates have been shown to increase during economic downturns such as Alberta is experiencing.

There were nearly 13,000 reports of intimate partner violence in the province in 2013, just over 10,000 of which involved female victims. In some cases, that violence escalated to homicide.

A Statistics Canada report says there were 960 intimate-partner homicides in Canada between 2003 and 2013. Almost 80 per cent of the victims were female.

There have been 17 confirmed intimate partner homicides in Edmonton in the past five years. Twelve of the Edmonton victims were female, and five were male.

In some intimate partner homicide cases there were additional victims, such as the killing of eight people in Edmonton in December 2014. In that case, Phu Lam killed six adults and two children, including his wife and members of her family. He then killed himself.

Jill Dean runs a program in Edmonton for women who have suffered domestic abuse, and lost her own sister, Nancy Cooper, to spousal homicide in 2008. She said Neill’s experience is not unusual, and that high-profile cases such as Skow’s are upsetting for women in her program, who feel like “it could be any one of them.”

“This happens every time there’s an incident like this,” she said. “The general sentiment is just fear.”

She said the women in her program were particularly disturbed by reports that people in the building heard Skow screaming, but didn’t call the police.

Neill says her relationship had been emotionally abusive from the start, with her boyfriend calling her names, distancing her from her friends, controlling her behaviour, and playing mind games to make Neill and others doubt her sanity.

Court records show he has convictions for assaults, and threatening and breaching no-contact orders, all with Neill named as the victim. He is not being identified in this story because there is a charge currently before the courts.

Neill says she was physically assaulted the first time because he thought she had been flirting with other men. They were on vacation in the mountains at the time, and he was arrested and charged. Neill was driving out of town when he called and asked her to come pick him up from the RCMP detachment. She turned around.

“When he was a good guy, he was the best guy,” she says, explaining her decision to stay in the relationship. “But when he was the worst, I was almost dead.”

In many ways, Neill’s entire life was preparing her for the relationship. She says abuse she suffered as a child and from another partner created in her both a deep desire to be loved, and a belief that any problems were her fault and could be fixed. Neill said she finally left the relationship after a colleague asked about her bruises, but said: “Don’t tell me you fell down the stairs.”

Neill says by then she had been beaten, suffocated, threatened and had her face intentionally burned with a cigarette, but still she stayed. Somehow, her colleague’s question twigged a change in her.

“That just clicked something in me that no matter what, I don’t deserve this,” she says. “I can’t be that bad to have caused this.”

Liam Ennis, a forensic psychologist with ALERT’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (I-TRAC), said it’s well-established that leaving is the most perilous time in a domestic violence relationship.

“It’s not just difficult, it’s dangerous,” he said.

With this in mind, agencies that work with domestic violence help victims prepare exit plans and take steps to protect themselves after they leave. Dean says having a safety plan is “first and foremost,” which includes building support networks and putting personal safety measures in place. It is the double-edged sword of an abusive situation, she says. You are in danger if you stay, and you are in danger if you leave.

Nadine Skow had broken up with her boyfriend nearly a year before her death. He is currently in custody, charged with second-degree murder.

The Family Violence Death Review Committee was formed in Alberta last year to review homicides and suicides related to intimate partner violence in the province. Alberta Human Services spokeswoman Aileen Machell says the committee has finished reviewing family violence-related deaths from 2008 to 2014, and has selected six cases for closer review. The first report is expected later this year.

Specialized domestic violence units such as I-TRAC and the Edmonton Police Service’s domestic offender crime section work to monitor high-risk domestic violence cases in the province, in hopes of identifying offenders and relationships that have increased risk of serious violence or homicide.

The I-TRAC program, which was created in 2007 after several high-profile domestic homicides in the province, uses highly trained threat assessors to review cases, attempting to protect victims. About 150 cases are reviewed every year.

Ennis, the program’s forensic psychologist, says domestic violence differs from other crimes in that police usually know who the victim will be. But while there are factors that raise the level of threat, he says domestic homicide can still be very hard to predict. And, fortunately, it remains a relatively rare occurrence in domestic violence relationships.

“A woman’s intuition about whether she’s at risk from her partner is about as good as any tool we’ve got,” he says.

Neill says she did everything she could to protect herself after leaving her relationship, and continues to take several precautions. She admits her behaviour may seem paranoid to some, but says that can be an effect of long-term vigilance or part of “gaslighting,” where the abuser intentionally does things to try to make the victim appear unbalanced.

“It’s easier to blame the victim. It’s easier to call me crazy,” she says. “You and I and everybody in the world wants to believe in a just and sound world, and that people are good. So we have a hard time wrapping our minds around that this is possible … We just don’t want to admit it’s happening in our midst.”

Neill says being a victim of domestic violence has devastated her life. After a successful career in the military and a job with the legislature, she is currently unemployed, struggling with post-traumatic stress, and often afraid to go outside. She says she sleeps poorly, has lost friends, and has on a couple of occasions even considered suicide.

But she is also taking steps to make herself better. Neill says she is using recreation, meditation and physical activity to come to terms with the abuse she experienced in her life, so that hopefully she will be able to have healthy relationships in the future.

“There are a lot of effects of trauma, but I want to be my own hero and come out of this better than before,” she says.

She says speaking out about her experience is also part of her recovery, a way of reclaiming her own power and voice, after feeling like it was gone for so long.

“I’ve been so shamed,” she says. “I have lost everything almost, and I will not be shamed into silence. I just want it to be out there.”

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'I want to be my own hero': Former Edmonton soldier fights back against domestic violence

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